I’ve been involved in Effective Altruism since 2015, including founding a society and working in movement building. Later, I quit my job as a digital consultant to work on AI. I did a data science bootcamp and the AIM Research Training Program. Now I offer freelance AI Governance research assistance and facilitate BlueDot Impact’s AI Governance course.
My Writing:
This was a great experience and I learnt a lot:
Choosing a research topic is a whole research project in itself
The writing phase takes much longer than the earlier phase of working out what to write (more than twice as long)
Co-working on research with one other person is great. It’s very motivating and you learn a lot from each other. You have faster feedback loops and so can make a better outcome sooner.
This kind of research-writing-co-working is very mentally tiring (at first I couldn’t do more than 4hrs per day)
We really wanted to complete the project in a tight timeframe. I actually posted this 2 weeks after we finished because it was the first chance I had.
Some reflections:
I think that the amount of time we set aside was too short for us, and we could still have made worthwhile improvements with more time to reflect, such as:
Choosing an easier topic for our first research project
Doing more further reading
I think the section on Risk-conducive preferences (RCPs) is not important enough to warrant the amount of words it is taking up
Many sentences could be re-written to improve the wording, and I don’t think ‘Factors of malevolent actors’ is a very good heading.
(I’ll come back and reply to this comment with more of my own reflections if I think of more and get more time in the next day or two) (edit: formatting)
Can applicants update their application after submitting?
This was an extremely useful feature of Lightspeed Grants, because the strength of my application significantly improved every couple of weeks.
If it’s not a built-in feature, can applicants link to a google doc?
Thank you answering our questions!
Thank you! Since it’s (my) first post, it’s helpful to have some positive encouragement.
We actually intended not to give examples of those.
That’s useful feedback on the diagram, thanks.